Companies and employees are discovering that remote work is not just possible—it may even be preferable. A whopping 52% of people say they are considering shifting to hybrid or remote work this year, and remote and hybrid jobs are the most popular among applicants—they garner 2.6 times more views and 3 times more applications than on-site positions.

Clearly, hybrid work is here to stay. Anticipating this change early on, many updates to Microsoft 365, including in Teams, have been geared toward facilitating successful hybrid work. Let’s look at some of the newest and upcoming features that will make a big difference in your hybrid workplace.

Acquainting yourself with all the apps and technology required to perform your job responsibilities is a hefty task, let alone using your tech stack with peak efficiency. That’s why it’s so beneficial when applications work together to help you do your job. Enter Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 applications. Built to seamlessly and natively integrate with each other, these business and productivity apps make it easier to transition from one to the other throughout your workday—sometimes without having to actually open another screen.

Microsoft Teams provides businesses with an excellent solution for managing file storage and collaboration. It has its own editor for Word and other Microsoft 365 app files that can be useful for some quick, small changes. However, for larger edits and authoring, it is usually much easier to open the file in the corresponding desktop application such as Word. The functionality is usually better and the formatting can be a bit difficult when editing in Teams itself. New in the preview release of Microsoft Teams is the ability to set the default opening behavior.

Integrating an email account to Business Central using an Outlook add-in can help users better keep track of which documents are sent to which contacts. Here’s how you can integrate Business Central with Outlook, plus a few of the scenarios where you’d want to use this helpful feature.

How many workdays have been filled completing manual, repetitive, time-consuming business processes, like sending reminders, scheduling meetings, or completing the steps of an approval? These tasks are necessary, but they often require time and energy that employees could otherwise spend on driving the business forward. With advancements in technology and the power of automation, these processes can be done—often from start to finish—automatically, freeing up time in your day for all the other important things you do for your company.

Businesses and employees have needed to embrace a “new normal” workplace reality, and it’s crucial that remote, asynchronous, and hybrid work options can keep up with expectations. One thing has been clear – innovation and growth mindsets are key factors in successfully getting things done together, even while working apart.

Microsoft Teams provides an all-in-one collaboration solution for environments returning in-person, embracing remote work, and everything in between. The best features of the Microsoft Teams desktop app have been optimized into a mobile app for iOS and Android, letting users talk with anyone, anywhere — without missing out on the capabilities of the desktop version.

Accessibility should be the standard, not the exception. Fortunately, that is the direction culture is shifting. Microsoft 365 products are designed with accessible and inclusive features that work with any individual to better create, interact with, understand, and retain content. Documents, presentations, meetings, and emails can be better—more accessible, inclusive, easier to create, intuitive, interactive, successful. Here are seven accessibility and inclusivity tools and the Microsoft 365 applications they can be used within.

After the forced pivot to remote work due to the pandemic, companies have learned an important lesson: working from home can be effective and productive. Though the quick and easy option for a “return to work” plan might be reverting to business-as-usual pre-pandemic, innovative and growth-minded companies will want to embrace those lessons brought about by remote work. This means establishing hybrid workplace policies, which 80% of managers expect to implement and 70% of employees plan to use.

Designing a SharePoint site requires knowledge of how SharePoint site structures work and a deep understanding of how you want SharePoint users to navigate and interact with the site. With new SharePoint site templates, Microsoft provides teams with a starting point to develop a customized site that fits the exact needs of your team. In this blog we’ll cover what a SharePoint site is and how to get started with site templates.

Many users prefer to use “Dark Mode” in their Office applications as it reduces the amount of bright white light on screen that can get quite uncomfortable after a while. Luckily, Microsoft Office has themes that can be used to change the color appearance of Office applications like Word and Outlook to be, for example, black.

In the past, the black Office theme has kept Word documents white while turning most of the user interface to the darker color. However, it seems that Word has recently started turning the documents of some users black as well.

Over two years ago, Microsoft announced that Skype for Business Online would be retired on July 31, 2021. Now that we are a mere three months from that date, Microsoft is providing more details and information for moving existing Skype for Business customers to Microsoft Teams. It’s important to note that the retirement of Skype for Business Online does not affect the Skype consumer service or Skype for Business Server. These services will continue to operate as normal.

For the people familiar with Microsoft Teams, it is known largely as collaboration tool for businesses to quickly communicate via text and audio/video calling along with group file management and editing capabilities. However, Teams can also be utilized to host live events. Live events like webinars are a great way to engage with audiences in an online setting.

These are events where the communication is largely conducted as one or more individuals presenting to a large group that viewing the presentation and interacting with chat, polls, or questions.

Time is the most valuable resource for any employee. For employees who have been working from home for the past year, managing time to ensure work gets done and personal life doesn’t take a hit can be sometimes difficult.

The goal of Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook and Microsoft Teams is to help manage time and ensure communication is efficient. Specifically in Outlook, the calendar can be used to effectively manage meetings and work life balance in a user-friendly way.

Here are some new features in Outlook employees can use to ensure they are taking time for themselves while still getting the job done.

With many organizations still operating in a work from home environment, digital communication is integral to maintaining on the same page. In a recent update to Microsoft 365, there are new ways for team members to interact and improve that sense of comradery that is often missed is a digital setting. Let’s walk through three ways Microsoft 365 apps are now integrated into Microsoft Teams to help employees stay connected.

Microsoft Teams stands tall not only as an effective method for businesses to facilitate internal communications, but also as a way for them to collaborate on their work. Teams allows for seamless collaboration in a variety of applications, especially with other Microsoft applications such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SharePoint.

Teams has an integration to work with Dynamics 365 applications such as Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing. This integration is receiving some new features as part of the 2021 Dynamics 365 Release Wave 1. They’re expected to be coming with the first part of the release wave next month.

Microsoft Teams is a great tool for facilitating internal communications and ensuring every member of the organization stays up to date. It keeps teams focused and advancing towards the same goals. SharePoint is a file management system that gives secure file storage to the entire organization.

SharePoint can be customized and structured to best fit the needs of the business. These are both great products that help facilitate effective collaboration within an organization.

If your organization already uses Microsoft Teams for internal or external communication, you’ll be happy to know that Microsoft continues to release monthly updates for the application that greatly advance the collaboration capabilities. If you haven’t used Teams before, it is included in most Microsoft 365 packages and integrates with the Office storage applications like SharePoint and traditional Office applications like Word and Excel. We’ve put together a list of the latest updates to Microsoft Teams that will encourage collaboration among your staff.

Back in August, Microsoft announced the official end of support for Internet Explorer coming in late 2021. This announcement also included a slew of end-of-support dates for Microsoft 365 application support of Internet Explorer. As of November 30, 2020, Microsoft Teams no longer supports Internet Explorer 11.

This is an update to a previous blog detailing the default opening behavior of Office 365 app files in OneDrive. The process has largely changed since the original blog post. The purpose of this blog is to show how to set OneDrive up to automatically open Office 365 files in the desktop app, rather than the online app.

Microsoft Lists, a recently released Microsoft 365 productivity application, has proven to be a catalyst to help companies organize and track tasks. On its own, Microsoft Lists allows users to create and share lists with members of their organization to view, edit, and complete within the app - even on mobile. However, where it really shines is in its integration with Microsoft Teams.

Since Microsoft originally released Microsoft Teams as a successor to Skype for Business, they have been consistently improving the application with regular updates designed to make communication and collaboration easier for organizations of all sizes. With the recent situation surrounding COVID-19, many organizations have begun to rely more heavily on Microsoft Teams to help their staff communicate and collaborate while working remotely.

We’ve put together a few of the most beneficial features Microsoft Teams has to offer to organizations looking to take advantage of the communication app in a more effective way.

The main way SharePoint manages their documents is through document libraries which keeps documents organized through the column system. As part of their annual August update, SharePoint Online will be bring some changes to this column system which may clear up some headaches that have always been associated with the feature.

Microsoft Teams gives users the ability to record their meetings. Recording meetings can be useful for training sessions or webinars that you want to reuse in the future. When a meeting is recorded in Microsoft Teams, it is automatically uploaded to Microsoft Stream, the default video player application in Microsoft 365. It is very easy to share videos uploaded to Microsoft Stream with members of your organization, but there is currently no way to share videos in Microsoft Stream with external users. So what should you do if you need to share a recorded Teams meeting with someone outside of your organization? This blog will go through the easiest workaround.

Microsoft Forms provides multiples ways to customize forms in a way that make them your own or adhere to brand standards. Updating a form theme or background with custom images or colors will help legitimize the form for your audience and make it look more appealing.

Smaller retailers like hair salons, auto repair shops, boutiques, and other small to midsize retailers who don’t have dedicated teams to implement advanced COVID-19 response operations can utilize appointment booking software like Microsoft Bookings to safely open their business to their customers.

Within Microsoft Teams, Teams are the highest level of organizations for groups of users. Teams can be used to communicate with groups of people, store relevant group files, or even just post notifications. Typically we see Teams be created for departments, project teams, specific office location staff, or group interests, but Teams can be created for just about any group type.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and its subsequent spread around the world, many companies and employees are taking the responsible step to have employees work from home to combat further spread of the virus, a concept known as social distancing. Companies of all sizes may struggle to adequately prepare staff to work remotely full-time. They may not have the equipment or the tools to access work resources remotely.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and its subsequent spread around the world, many companies and employees are taking the responsible step to have employees work from home to combat further spread of the virus, a concept known as social distancing. Companies of all sizes may struggle to adequately prepare staff to work remotely full-time. They may not have the equipment or the tools to access work resources remotely.

On March 2nd, Microsoft announced they would be providing 6 free months of Microsoft Teams licensing in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. If your organization has implemented or is considering a work from home policy, Microsoft Teams can give your users an organized way to communicate and stay productive while out of the office.

Regardless of where staff work, they need to communicate and collaborate to complete tasks and projects. You may worry that the distance will cause interruption in business processes. Office 365 provides organizations a way to strengthen their team communication and collaboration while also giving employees flexibility during these uncertain times.

Does it seem like your Microsoft Office apps are updating all the time, or are updates only available every few months? Read this blog to learn about Office update channels, how they differ, and why you may want to choose each specific one.

Take control of your Office files and documents by establishing a permanent opening location. Whether you prefer the desktop or web, the choice is now yours. Learn how its done and how to make the option available to your users.

Microsoft Search is a new, unified search experience that works across Windows 10, Office 365 apps, and the Bing search engine. Announced in September 2018, it reached General Availability in May 2019 for all users of Office and Microsoft 365.

With two apps that seem to serve the same purpose, it’s hard for organizations to determine what they should do. Get a full explanation of how Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business are coexisting today, Microsoft’s plans for the future, and how you can use the apps together.

In a recent update to Office 365, Microsoft has included an autosave feature that is turned on by default. While this feature can be useful, there may be a time when you want to make changes to a file without saving yet. Here’s how to turn it off.

OneDrive from Microsoft allows both business and personal users to save their files in the cloud and access them anytime, from anywhere. In this blog we will discuss the issue of OneDrive only opening documents in the online version of their app. While this action may seem like an error to users, it’s actually the default behavior of OneDrive to open files in the online version. The good news is that changing this behavior is rather easy and takes only a few quick clicks.

Chat programs are often built to be simplistic and serve a single purpose – to increase collaboration through instant communication among team members. Microsoft Teams takes that purpose and expands on it with exciting new features built specifically for project teams or departments within a business. This isn’t just chat, this isn’t email, it’s a combination of the two meant to improve organization and collaboration of teams. The video below is a nice introduction of Microsoft Teams for those who haven’t seen it in action before.

If you’ve recently implemented SharePoint Online as part of Office 365, you may be feeling a bit baffled as to why every time you try to open a document from SharePoint, it opens in Word or Excel Online, rather than directly on your desktop. This is actually the default behavior for SharePoint documents.

OneDrive and SharePoint are document storage and management services which provide a secure place to house and interact with your documents. Although both accomplish very similar things, they are useful under different circumstances. OneDrive provides a safe space for personal documents wile SharePoint helps manage organizational documents.

Phishing is on the rise again and now more than ever it's critical to defend yourself against intrusions that can compromise your business. Just this year the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center was targeted by ransomware injected into their system through a phishing attack. In the end, they ended up shelling out a whopping $17,000 to re-appropriate all of their client’s medical documents.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to Windows 10, now is the time. Microsoft has confirmed its commitment to the July 29, 2016 cutoff date for offering a Windows 10 upgrade for free to Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 users.

If you use Office 365, you may have noticed that Microsoft recently changed the settings layout within the Office 365 Portal. This means that there is a new path for creating and updating app passwords. If you aren’t sure what app passwords are, your organization probably isn’t using them. App passwords are used for Mutli-Factor Authentication within Office 365 to add a second level of security to your Office 365 files.

Last month Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10. This means those versions of IE will no longer get security patches and technical support. It is critical that you get security updates to ensure your system doesn't get compromised by malware, spyware, adware, or any other malicious code. In addition, you'll want to be on an updated version of IE to ensure any web pages you visit will work properly.

Microsoft has quietly rolled out a cool new feature for Office 365 Business that gives you the power to move and re size your apps within the Office 365 app launcher. This is an exciting feature for people that use the app launcher to switch between Office 365 apps and for those who don’t use the app launcher, this will be a fun way to get into a habit of using it more.